


Have Lighted Fools the Way

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Series: Untimely Ripped [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Magic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Fifteen Minute Fic, Friendship, Gen, Humanstuck, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Male-Female Friendship, Resurrection, Strained Relationships, Worry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 11:53:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2580530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The day after <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1862190">Untimely Ripped</a>, Aradia's absence from school doesn't go unnoticed.  Sollux & Terezi.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Have Lighted Fools the Way

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by the 10/26/14 [15_minute_ficlets](http://15_minute_ficlets.dreamwidth.org) word #209. I do want to write some more in this AU, but I make no promises about the subject matter or timing of any further stories.

Aradia is late for first period calculus.

Sollux slouches lower in his chair, caught uncomfortably between the November chill of the windows and the heat blasting down from the ceiling vents, and wonders why he's surprised. It's not like his best friend hasn't been letting go of everything else in her life: the fall drama production, her position as the soccer team's star striker, the literary arts magazine, her _friends_... It was probably just a matter of time before she started forgetting school as well.

He should have tried harder to talk to her over the summer. Should have dragged her out of that house with its shadow of death, or just steeled himself to sit there and show her she wasn't alone. He is the suckiest friend in the history of terrible, useless, selfish, fair-weather friends.

Up at the front of the room, Ms. D'Amelio is doing an interpretive dance about sine, cosine, and tangent graphs that has the rest of the class cracking up.

Sollux rolls his eyes and scribbles more machine code in the margins of his notebook. Jade and Equius are both impossible in their own special ways, but they're almost as good at engineering as they think they are, and it's not going to be his fault if their robot fails to make it to the final rounds of this year's competition. He sucks at being a friend, but at least he can do this.

He keeps half an ear tuned to the lesson, in case Ms. D'Amelio calls him to explain one of the homework problems on the blackboard. Unfortunately, he forgets to pay attention to his fellow students.

Terezi practically draws blood when she jabs him with her pencil.

"What the double-fucking _fuck?_ " Sollux hisses at her. "I could be bleeding. You could have punctured my lung and left me suffocating in the middle of school, all my potential lost like data trapped in obsolete storage technology."

"A tragedy, I'm sure. How could I forget that your skin is so weak I could tear it wide open with my eraser," Terezi says, twirling the pencil of doom between her permanently ink-stained fingers. "Aradia's not here."

Sollux kicks her as best he can across the aisle. "Brilliant observation, TZ. Next you'll be telling me you can't divide by zero."

Terezi points her pencil at him in a gesture that really shouldn't seem as threatening as it does. "Shut up. Listen. She has a routine. She let everything else go because sports and plays and people aren't predictable. But she comes to school every day -- she came even when she had the Flu of Death last month -- because it's in the routine. And she's not here."

Sollux thinks about this. Terezi lets him. Somewhere in the background, Dave Lalonde is bullshitting his way through a homework problem -- he'll get the right answer in the end, but only after he's thrown in about two dozen irrelevant variables, given them an elaborate tale of Shakespearean woe as expressed in terrible rap, and canceled them back out in a choreographed bloodbath.

"Shit," Sollux says after a while. "Do you think...?"

Suicide is a meme, in a way. One person dies, other people start to think maybe that's the solution to their problems, lather, rinse, repeat. There was already one would-be copycat this summer -- some little middle-school kid took her dad's pills and got caught halfway through slashing up her wrists. And Aradia's been a practically textbook case of situational depression and shitty coping methods, which he should have noticed a lot sooner if he were any use as a human being instead of a shitty waste of complex chemical reactions.

The corners of Terezi's mouth turn down, and Sollux realizes how tense and miserable the set of her shoulders is. "I don't know," she says. "I never thought she-- but then, nobody thought Damara would either. So. I don't know."

"Shit," Sollux says again.

At the front of the room, Dave arrives at the solution with a flourish, drops the chalk into the tray at the base of the blackboard, and ambles back to his seat. He takes the long route -- starts by ruffling Karkat's hair, then heads back toward Terezi. Sollux braces himself for more terrible flirting. He has no idea what Terezi sees in that insufferable asshole.

But Dave just tips down his douchey shades and looks back and forth between Sollux and Terezi. "Hey. Keep this on the down-low, but Megido's fine. It just turns out she's got more in common with me and Rose than anyone expected. Also, there's no such thing as zombies... but don't be surprised who answers the phone when you check on her during study hall."

Then he steals Terezi's pencil and slips away.

Sollux stares at Terezi, mind racing. If Aradia has something in common with the Lalonde twins -- beyond a complete lack of common sense -- and zombies aren't real but someone unexpected (someone dead?) is at her house to answer the telephone...

"She _raised the dead?_ " Terezi says, so faint that Sollux wouldn't have heard if he hadn't been thinking the exact same thing. "Oh my god. It's like when she went after Vriska, only ten thousand times worse. I am going to kill her."

"Join the club," Sollux says.

Magic! You don't mess around with magic! Not unless you want to lose whatever chance you had at a normal life. And even then, it's one thing to be a witch like the Lalondes, who never do anything major without a metric shit-ton of plausible deniability, and another entirely to bring your sister -- whose death was _the_ big news story for a whole week -- back to life. What in the names of all the gods was Aradia thinking?!

"She's not getting away from us by skipping school," Terezi says grimly, and Sollux nods.

Ms. D'Amelio calls him up to demonstrate the next problem before they can start making plans, but Sollux is certain he and Terezi are on the same page. By third period, there are going to be several more unexplained absences in their shared classes -- they share study hall with Feferi and Jade, and Terezi can figure out some way to pass the news to Tavros.

They won't bother calling, though.

Aradia owes them an explanation in person.


End file.
